AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHY.
Two private diarists, whose autobiographic records remained unknown to
their contemporaries, have justly obtained classic rank by the
publication of their records in the nineteenth century. One of these,
Samuel Pepys, stands incontestably at the head of the world's literature
in his own department. John Evelyn, possessing neither the humour, the
_naivete_, the shrewdness, or the uncompromising frankness of his rival
and friend, occupies a much lower place as an autobiographer, though
more highly endowed as a scholar and a man of letters. Born in 1620 of a
prosperous county family, whose fortune had been made by the manufacture
of gunpowder, he found himself an idle young Templar at the outbreak of
the Civil War. Three days' service in the royal army sufficed him, and
in 1643 he obtained the king's permission to travel. This does not seem
very heroic conduct, but the family estate, lying at Wotton, near
Dorking, was probably in the actual occupation of the Parliamentarians.
He remained abroad until 1647, and his notes on art and antiquity are
among the most valuable portions of his diary. Study and gardening were
his chief occupations under the Commonwealth, varied with some cautious
intriguing on behalf of the exiled king. Under the Restoration he was in
great favour, and, although taking no part in politics, filled several
honourable public offices. A sincere Churchman, he was greatly alarmed
by James II.'s illegalities, and acquiesced in the Revolution as a
necessary evil. In 1695 he was appointed treasurer to Greenwich
Hospital. He died in 1706. The general view of his character is that
expressed by Mr. Leslie Stephen, who describes him as 'the typical
instance of the accomplished and public-spirited gentleman of the
Restoration.' The chief dissentient from this favourable estimate is a
person of weight, De Quincey, who, in a conversation with Woodhouse,
violently attacks Evelyn's _Diary_, three years after its publication,
as 'a weak, good-for-nothing little book, much praised by weak people,'
and abuses the author as 'a shallow, empty, cowardly, vain, assuming
coxcomb,' 'a mere literary fribble, a fop, and a smatterer affecting
natural history and polite learning.' There is just this much of truth
in this splenetic onslaught, that Evelyn was an amateur in authorship,
and that his high character and influential friendships no doubt
contributed much to the esteem with which the works published in his
lifetime were regarded in his day. The _Diary_ stands on a different
footing; it appealed to a remote and impartial public, and the appeal
has been justified by edition after edition.
Evelyn's claims to literary distinction rest principally upon his
_Diary_ and his _Sylva_, which will be noticed in another place. The
chief literary merits of the _Diary_ are its unassuming simplicity and
perfect perspicuity of style and phrase. Infinitely less interesting
than Pepys's, it has the advantage of covering a much more extensive
period, and faithfully reflecting the feelings of a loyal, pious,
sensible Englishman at various important crises of public affairs.
Unlike Pepys, whose estimates of men and things are very fluctuating,
Evelyn is consistent, and we may feel sure that any modification of
sentiment that may be observed in him faithfully represents the
inevitable influence of circumstances upon a man of independent
judgment. His personal loyalty to the house of Stuart is manifestly
cooled, though not chilled, by the scandals of Charles II.'s reign; but
it is not until Church and King come into open conflict in the reign of
James II. that Evelyn gives any countenance to a violent change of
government, which it is clear he would most willingly have avoided. The
extreme caution and moderation of his language lend weight to his
disapprobation, and indicate more forcibly than any vigour of
declamation how completely James had alienated his true friends.
Evelyn's position was that of one who could neither lift a hand against
the Government or stretch one out to defend it. His unaffected style
almost rises into poetry as he succinctly enumerates the omens which
heralded the downfall of James:
'_October 14._ The King's birthday. No guns from the Tower as
usual. The sun eclipsed at its rising. This day signal for the
victory of William the Conqueror against Harold, near Battel,
in Sussex. The wind, which had been hitherto west, was east all
this day. Wonderful expectation of the Dutch fleet. Public
prayers ordered to be read in the churches against invasion.'
The interest of the early part of the _Diary_ is of a different kind. It
is occupied with the author's continental travels, and shows what was
thought best worth seeing in that age, with many curious incidental
traits of manners, and examples of the hardships and perils with which
wayfarers were then beset. As always, we have to lament that the
traveller was in that day so much of a mere sightseer, and took so
little pains to acquaint himself with the moral, intellectual, or
industrial life of the nations he visited. This was the universal
failing of the age, and of all preceding ages; not until the eighteenth
century do we meet with a really philosophical traveller. Evelyn,
however, is not insensible to humanity when it is thrust upon his
attention; and his study of painting in his youth, and the taste for
arboriculture which produced his _Sylva_, qualify him beyond most of his
contemporaries for the description of the aspects of nature. The feeling
for nature and the feeling for humanity are well combined in the
following passage:
'We went then to visit the galleys, being about twenty-five in
number; the Capitaine of the Galley Royal gave us most
courteous entertainment in his cabin, the slaves in the interim
playing both loud and soft music very rarely. Then he showed
how he commanded their motions with a nod, and his whistle
making them row out. The spectacle was to me new and strange,
to see so many hundreds of miserably naked persons, their heads
being shaven close and having only high red bonnets, a pair of
coarse canvass drawers, their whole backs and legs naked,
doubly chained about their middle and legs, in couples, and
made fast to their seats, and all commanded in a trice by an
imperious and cruel seaman. One Turk amongst the rest he much
favoured, who waited on him in his cabin, but with no other
dress than the rest, and a chain locked about his leg, but not
coupled. This galley was richly carved and gilded, and most of
the rest were very beautiful. After bestowing something on the
slaves, the capitaine sent a band of them to give us music at
dinner where we lodged. I was amazed to contemplate how these
miserable caitiffs lie in their galley crowded together; yet
there was hardly one but had some occupation, by which, as
leisure and calms permitted, they got some little money,
insomuch as some of them have, after many years cruel
servitude, been able to purchase their liberty. The
rising-forward and falling-back at their oar, is a miserable
spectacle, and the noise of their chains, with the roaring of
the beaten waters, has something of strange and fearful in it
to one unaccustomed to it. They are ruled and chastised by
strokes on their backs and soles of their feet, on the least
disorder, and without the least humanity, yet are they cheerful
and full of knavery.'
Evelyn's _Diary_, however, with all its desert, sinks into
insignificance beside the _Diary_ of Samuel Pepys, but the same remark
applies to almost every diary in the world. Pepys's _Diary_ has been
frequently compared with Boswell's _Life of Johnson_, and with justice
in so far as the charm of each arises from the inimitable _naivete_ of
the author's self-revelations. Boswell had a much greater character than
his own to draw, but Pepys had to be his own Johnson. It is giving him
no excessive praise to say that he makes himself as interesting as
Johnson and Boswell together. There cannot be a stronger proof of the
infinite interest and importance of humanity that when we for once get a
fellow-creature to depict himself as he really is, the most trivial
details become matters of serious concern. We sympathize with Pepys as
we sympathize with Ulysses, and are for the time much more anxious about
the liquidation of his tailor's bill, or the adjustment of his
misunderstandings with his wife, than 'what the Swede intends or what
the French.' The only drawback is that the Pepys in whom we are so
deeply interested is, after all, not altogether the true Pepys; not the
distinguished civil servant or the intelligent promoter of science; not
the man as he appeared to his friends and contemporaries, but an
incarnation of whatever was petty, or ludicrous, or self-seeking in a
man of no inconsiderable official and intellectual distinction. 'A very
worthy, industrious, and curious person,' says Evelyn, 'universally
beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skilled in music,
a very great cherisher of learned men, of whom he had the conversation.'
All these traits are abundantly confirmed by passages in the _Diary_,
and yet, so infinitely more vivid is the delineation of the writer's
foibles, that one attempting to draw his character from the _Diary_
would hardly have noticed them.
Pepys's life is chiefly remarkable for the extraordinary good fortune
which raised him from an humble and precarious position to one in which
he was enabled to render great service to his country. The son of a
London tailor, whose family came from Brampton in Huntingdonshire, he
had the good fortune to be distantly related to Sir Edward Montagu,
afterwards Earl of Sandwich, one of the chief agents in the Restoration,
to whose patronage he owed everything. A sizar and scholar at Cambridge,
he married somewhat early and imprudently, accompanied his patron when
he went as admiral to the Sound in 1658, and upon his return appears to
have filled an inferior clerkship in the Exchequer. The Restoration
brought him into the Admiralty, and for long after his history is one of
rapid rise and increasing wealth, mainly acquired by means which would
now be thought most reprehensible in a civil servant, but which the lax
official morality of his day absolved or but faintly condemned. In 1669
the weakness of his eyes compelled him to discontinue his _Diary_ and to
solicit leave of absence from official duty on a tour in France and
Holland. Shortly after his return he lost his wife, whose leaning to the
Roman Catholic religion gave colour to a charge against himself of being
a concealed Romanist, the object of which was to invalidate his election
to Parliament for Aldborough. These proceedings failed, but in 1679 he
was imprisoned for a short time on an accusation of being concerned in
the Popish Plot, and, notwithstanding the absurdity of the charge, found
it advisable to withdraw for a while from the Admiralty. He was
reinstated in 1684, having in the interim made a voyage to Tangier on
public business. Under James II., who understood naval affairs and knew
the worth of Pepys, he attained to great influence, and the navy to
this day is deeply indebted to him for the improvements he introduced
into its administration. He lost his employments at the Revolution, and
retired to a life of scholarly leisure, dying in 1703. In 1684 he had
become President of the Royal Society, of which he had been one of the
earliest members, and long after his retirement the members continued to
meet at his house.
Pepys bequeathed his library to Magdalen College, Cambridge, where it is
preserved in exactly the same condition as he left it. The immortal
_Diary_ was among the books, but attracted no notice until about 1811.
It was shortly afterwards deciphered by the Rev. J. Smith, and published
in 1825 by Lord Braybrooke, who omitted much of the most racy and
characteristic part as below the dignity of history. These omissions
were principally supplied in the edition of the Rev. Mynors Bright,
1875; and Mr. Henry Wheatley is now publishing an edition absolutely
complete, with the exception of some few passages positively
unprintable.
No work of the kind in the world's literature can for a moment be
compared to Pepys's _Diary_; but many circumstances must combine ere the
existence of such a book is possible. It is characteristic of Pepys to
be at once a very extraordinary and a very ordinary person. In one point
of view he is the most perfect representative imaginable of the
bourgeois type of humanity, worthy, sensible, indispensable, and at the
same time dull, prosaic, and narrow-minded. Yet this solid citizen has a
dash of the Gil Blas in him too; and his little rogueries and
servilities appear the more amusing by contrast with the really
estimable and respectable background of his character. These qualities
combined make a perfect hero of autobiography; his ordinary qualities
awaken a fellow-feeling for so characteristic a specimen of average
humanity, and his deviations from the straight path communicate the
piquancy of comedy, sometimes the exuberance of farce. Extraordinary he
is too, for assuredly no one ever recorded his thoughts and actions with
such absolute sincerity; or if anyone ever did, his thoughts and actions
were not worthy of record. Those of Pepys, somehow, always seem worthy
of being perpetuated. However trivial they may sometimes be, they are
saved by the writer's admirable manner, and the contagious earnestness
of his conviction that they are in truth of deep concern. The reader,
moreover, is continually exercised by the problem whether his author is
really aware of the display he is making of himself. If he is, he is a
miracle of courage; if not, his obtuseness is equally extraordinary. The
_Diary_, besides, is no less admirable as a delineation of the macrocosm
than of the microcosm. It paints the official and private circles in
which the author moved, the course of public affairs, the humours of
social life, with no less truth and frankness than it reveals the author
himself. It is by far the most valuable document extant for the
understanding of the times; better than all the histories and all the
comedies. It seems an unequalled piece of irony that the supreme piece
of workmanship in its way and the most lucid mirror of its age should be
the performance of an ordinary citizen who had not the least idea that
he was doing anything remarkable; who expected celebrity, if he expected
it at all, from his official tasks and scientific recreations; who
shrouded his work in shorthand lest the world should profit by it; and
who would have been dismayed beyond measure if he had foreseen that it
would be published after his death. Many chances have conspired for its
preservation; it is wonderful that the writer should not have destroyed
it; beyond expectation that he should have bequeathed it to Magdalen
College; fortunate, to say the least, that it should have been so well
preserved there, and have attracted attention at last. We shall never be
able to determine whether we have more reason to be thankful that it was
carried on so long, and so fortunately preserved, or to lament that it
was not continued throughout the periods of the Popish Plot and the Rye
House Plot, of Monmouth's rising, and of the Revolution.
The _Diary_ extends from January 1st, 1660, to May 31st, 1669, when
Pepys writes, 'And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do
with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal.' He recovered his sight,
at least to a great extent, but the habit was broken, and never resumed.
He had in the interim seen and described the Restoration, the Great
Plague, the Great Fire, and the great disaster of 1667, when the Dutch
burned the English fleet in the Medway. During this time he had seen
continually and been on terms more or less intimate with Charles II.,
the Duke of York, Monk, Clarendon, Sandwich, Shaftesbury, Sir William
Coventry, and a multitude of persons of lower degree of almost every
class of society except the Puritans, who are only represented by his
worthy predecessor in office, Mr. Blackburne. He has displayed himself
to us in almost every possible attitude, attending to accounts, drafting
state papers, measuring the timber in the dockyards, giving and taking
bribes, defending himself before the House of Commons, alternately a
Mercury and a Mentor to his patron, dissipating at the theatre, flirting
and something more with actresses and pretty servants, helping to set
the Royal Society going, sitting for his portrait, practising music,
buying and binding books, a perfect Proteus, yet always the same Pepys,
a true type of his age in its peculiar idiosyncrasies, and of human
nature in its essential sameness, heroic in no respect, yet admirable in
many, and, with many meannesses, by no means despicable, as good an
example as can be found of the truth of Goethe's dictum:
'Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln Drange
Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst.'
It is impossible to pass over so unique a work as the _Diary_ without
extract, yet extracts can only convey the impression of bricks from a
building. The following have been selected chiefly with reference to
their incomparable quaintness and raciness, the one grace which our
literature has forfeited without hope of recovery.
'_July 18, 1660._ Thence to my Lord about business, and being
in talk in comes one with half a buck from Hinchinbroke, and it
smelling a little strong my Lord did give it to me. I did carry
it to my mother.
'_July 8, 1661._ But, above all, our trouble is to find that
his estate appears nothing as we expected, and as all the world
believes; nor his papers so well sorted as I would have had
them, but all in confusion, that break my brains to understand
them. We missed also the surrenders of his copyhold land,
without which the land would not come to us, but to the
heir-at-law, so that what with this, and the badness of the
drink, and the ill opinion I have of the meat, and the biting
of the gnats by night, and my disappointment in getting home
this week, and the trouble of sorting all the papers, I am
almost out of my wits with trouble, only I appear the more
contented, because I would not have my father troubled.
'_Feb. 19, 1665._ In the evening comes Mr. Andrews, and we sung
together, and at supper hearing by accident of my maids their
letting in a roguing Scotch woman that haunts the office, to
help them to wash and scour in our house, and that very lately,
I fell mightily out, and made my wife, to the disturbance of
the house and neighbours, to beat our little girl, and then we
shut her down into the cellars, and there she lay all night.
'_July 12, 1667._ Thence after dinner home, and there find my
wife in a dogged humour for my not dining at home, and I did
give her a pull by the nose and some ill words, which she
provoked me to by something she spoke, that we fell
extraordinarily out, insomuch that, I going to the office to
avoid further anger, she followed me in a devilish manner
thither, and with much ado I got her into the garden out of
hearing, to prevent shame, and so home, and by degrees I find
it necessary to calm her, and did, and then to the office,
where pretty late, and then to walk with her in the garden, and
pretty good friends, and so to bed with my mind quiet.
'_Aug. 18, 1667._ I walked towards White Hall, but, being
weary, turned into St. Dunstan's Church, where I heard an able
sermon of the minister of the place; and stood by a pretty,
modest maid, whom I did labour to take by the hand; but she
would not, but got further and further from me; and at last I
could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to prick me
if I should touch her again; which seeing I did forbear, and
was glad I did spy her design. And then I fell to gaze upon
another pretty maid in a pew close to me, and she on me; and I
did go about to take her by the hand, which she suffered a
little and then withdrew. So the sermon ended, and the church
broke up, and my amours also.
'_Oct. 4, 1667._ To see Sir W. Batten. He is asleep, and so I
could not see him; but in an hour after word is brought me that
he is so ill that it is believed he cannot live till to-morrow,
which troubles me and my wife mightily, partly out of kindness,
he being a good neighbour, and partly out of the money he owes
me, upon our bargain of the late prize.'
The _naivete_ of these passages, and of hundreds more like them, remains
unequalled in literature. Novelists, as Le Sage in _Gil Blas_ and
Thackeray in _Barry Lyndon_, have striven hard to make their personages
paint themselves as they really are, but their art is far excelled by
Pepys's nature. If, as Carlyle deems, speech and hearing were
principally bestowed upon us that 'our brother might impart to us truly
how it stands with him in that inner man of his,' no man has turned the
former of these gifts to better account than Pepys. The same sincerity
renders him a truthful mirror of public sentiment; and his very
limitations, intellectual and moral, enhance the value of his testimony.
He has no bias to interfere with the veracity of his delineation; he
simply reports what people around him are saying and thinking; he can
show us how the stream goes, because he is borne along with it himself.
The lively description which we are about to quote of the consternation
caused by the Dutch irruption into the Thames in 1667, is an admirable
example of his power of reproducing the atmosphere around him:
'June 13th. No sooner up but hear the sad news confirmed of the
Royal Charles being taken by them, and now in fitting by them,
which Pett should have carried up higher by our several orders,
and deserves, therefore, to be hanged for not doing it, and
burning several others; and that another fleet is come up into
the Hope. Upon which news the King and Duke of York have been
below since four o'clock in the morning, to command the sinking
of ships at Barking-Creek, and other places, to stop their
coming up higher: which put me into such a fear, that I
presently resolved of my father's and wife's going into the
country; and, at two hours' warning, they did go by the coach
this day, with about L1,300 in gold in their night-bag. Pray
God give them good passage, and good care to hide it when they
come home! but my heart is full of fear. They gone, I continued
in fright and fear what to do with the rest. W. Hewer hath been
at the banker's, and hath got L500 out of Backewell's hands of
his own money; but they are so called upon that they will be
all broke, hundreds coming to them for money: and they answer
him, "It is payable at twenty days--when the days are out, we
will pay you;" and those that are not so, they make tell over
their money, and make their bags false, on purpose to give
cause to retell it, and so spend time. I cannot have my 200
pieces of gold again for silver, all being bought up last night
that were to be had, and sold for 24 and 25/ a-piece. So I must
keep the silver by me, which sometimes I think to fling into
the house of office, and then again know not how I shall come
by it, if we be made to leave the office. Every minute some one
or other calls for this or that order; and so I forced to be at
the office most of the day about the fire-ships which are to
be suddenly fitted out; and it's a most strange thing that we
hear nothing from any of my brethren at Chatham: so that we are
wholly in the dark, various being the reports of what is done
there; insomuch that I sent Mr. Clapham express thither to see
how matters go. I did, about noon, resolve to send Mr. Gibson
away after my wife with another 1,000 pieces, under colour of
an express to Sir Jeremy Smith; who is, as I hear, with some
ships at Newcastle; which I did really send to him, and may,
possibly, prove of good use to the King; for it is possible, in
the hurry of business, they may not think of it at Court, and
the charge of an express is not considerable to the King. The
King and Duke of York up and down all the day here and there;
sometime on Tower Hill, where the City militia was; where the
King did make a speech to them, that they should venture
themselves no further than he would himself. I also sent, my
mind being in pain, Saunders after my wife and father, to
overtake them at their night's lodging, to see how matters go
with them. In the evening, I sent for my cousin Sarah and her
husband, who come; and I did deliver them my chest of writings
about Brampton, and my brother Tom's papers, and my journals,
which I value much; and did send my two silver flagons to Kate
Joyce's: that so, being scattered what I have, something might
be saved. I have also made a girdle, by which, with some
trouble, I do carry about me L300 in gold about my body, that I
may not be without something in case I should be surprised: for
I think, in any nation but our's, people that appear, for we
are not indeed so, so faulty as we, would have their throats
cut.'
'July 14th (Lord's day). Up, and my wife, a little before four,
and to make us ready; and by and by Mrs. Turner come to us, by
agreement, and she and I staid talking below, while my wife
dressed herself, which vexed me that she was so long about it,
keeping us till past five o'clock before she was ready. She
ready; and, taking some bottles of wine, and beer, and some
cold fowl with us into the coach, we took coach and four
horses, which I had provided last night, and so away. A very
fine day, and so towards Epsom, talking all the way pleasantly,
and particularly of the pride and ignorance of Mrs. Lowther, in
having of her train carried up. The country very fine, only the
way very dusty. To Epsom, by eight o'clock, to the well; where
much company, and I drank the water: they did not, but I did
drink four pints. And to the town, to the King's Head; and hear
that my Lord Buckhurst and Nelly are lodged at the next house,
and Sir Charles Sedley with them: and keep a merry house. Poor
girl! I pity her; but more the loss of her at the King's house.
W. Hewer rode with us, and I left him and the women, and myself
walked to church, where few people to what I expected, and none
I knew, but all the Houblons, brothers, and them after sermon I
did salute, and walk with towards my inn.... Then I carried
them to see my cousin Pepys's house, and 'light, and walked
round about it, and they like it, as indeed it deserves, very
well, and is a pretty place; and then I walked them to the wood
hard by, and there got them in the thickets till they had lost
themselves, and I could not find the way into any of the walks
in the wood, which indeed are very pleasant, if I could have
found them. At last got out of the wood again; and I, by
leaping down the little bank, coming out of the wood, did
sprain my right foot, which brought me great present pain, but
presently, with walking, it went away for the present, and so
the women and W. Hewer and I walked upon the Downs, where a
flock of sheep was; and the most pleasant and innocent sight
that ever I saw in my life. We found a shepherd and his little
boy reading, far from any houses or sight of people, the Bible
to him; so I made the boy read to me, which he did, with the
forced tone that children do usually read, that was mighty
pretty, and then I did give him something, and went to the
father, and talked with him; and I find he had been a servant
in my cousin Pepys's house, and told me what was become of
their old servants. He did content himself mightily in my
liking his boy's reading, and did bless God for him, the most
like one of the old patriarchs that ever I saw in my life, and
it brought those thoughts of the old age of the world in my
mind for two or three days after. We took notice of his woollen
knit stockings of two colours mixed, and of his shoes shod with
iron, both at the toe and heels, and with great nails in the
soles of his feet, which was mighty pretty: and, taking notice
of them, why, says the poor man, the downs, you see, are full
of stones, and we are fain to shoe ourselves thus; and these,
says he, will make the stones fly till they ring before me. I
did give the poor man something, for which he was mighty
thankful, and I tried to cast stones with his horn crook. He
values his dog mightily, that would turn a sheep any way which
he would have him, when he goes to fold them: told me there was
about eighteen score sheep in his flock, and that he hath four
shillings a week the year round for keeping of them: and Mrs.
Turner, in the common fields here, did gather one of the
prettiest nosegays that ever I saw in my life. So to our coach,
and through Mr. Minnes's wood, and looked upon Mr. Evelyn's
house; and so over the common, and through Epsom town to our
inn, in the way stopping a poor woman with her milk-pail, and
in one of my gilt tumblers did drink our bellyfuls of milk,
better than any cream; and so to our inn, and there had a dish
of cream, but it was sour, and so had no pleasure in it; and so
paid our reckoning, and took coach, it being about seven at
night, and passed and saw the people walking with their wives
and children to take the air, and we set out for home, the sun
by and by going down, and we in the cool of the evening all the
way with much pleasure home, talking and pleasing ourselves
with the pleasure of this day's work. Mrs. Turner mightily
pleased with my resolution, which, I tell her, is never to keep
a country-house, but to keep a coach, and with my wife on the
Saturday to go sometimes for a day to this place, and then quit
to another place; and there is more variety and as little
charge, and no trouble, as there is in a country-house. Anon it
grew dark, and we had the pleasure to see several glow-worms,
which was mighty pretty, but my foot begins more and more to
pain me, which Mrs. Turner, by keeping her warm hand upon it,
did much ease; but so that when we come home, which was just at
eleven at night, I was not able to walk from the lane's end to
my house without being helped. So to bed, and there had a
cere-cloth laid to my feet, but in great pain all night long.'
Pepys's correspondence forms a useful adjunct to his diary. Some of the
letters addressed to him are very entertaining, especially that from Sir
Samuel Morland on his matrimonial misadventures. His own letters are
usually couched in a formal full-dress style, contrasting strongly with
the careless ease of the _Diary_. Numerous letters and other documents
from Pepys's pen on Admiralty affairs are extant in various
repositories, and should be collected and published. He is also the
author of an anonymous work on the deposition of Alphonso VI. of
Portugal, entitled _The Portugal History, or a Relation of the Troubles
that happened in the Court of Portugal in the years 1667 and 1668_
(published in 1677), which deserves more notice than it has received. It
is a curious history of a palace revolution, which must have been
written to order by the help of official documents, and is the more
remarkable from the close family connection of the Portuguese and
English Courts, which latter must have approved, if it did not instigate
the publication.
Much space has here been given to Pepys, and not unreasonably, for his
will be to all ages the classical model of the diary, and a model to
which not only no one ever will attain, but to which no one will
endeavour to attain. Such transparent candour and artless _naivete_ will
hardly in any future age of the world be found united to his parts and
knowledge. He is as supreme in his own sphere as Milton in his; and
another Milton is more likely to appear than another Pepys.
Another diarist, who, though far inferior to Pepys, deserves to be named
along with him, is Sir John Reresby (1634-89), a Yorkshire baronet, of
Thrybergh Hall, in the West Riding, a person of great influence by his
standing and property in the county. His objects in writing, he informs
us, were 'to instruct posterity how long it has pleased Providence to
continue us Reresbys in the same name and place; to save the labour of
turning over a great many obscure papers; and to preserve memorials of
some things of use as well as of curiosity.' This seems like the
prelude to a family history; the really important part of the book,
however, is not the introductory sketch of Reresby's ancestors, but a
diary with very wide gaps devoted in the main to setting forth the
writer's relations with the Court and his neighbours. To the latter he
is the grand seigneur; towards the former his attitude is not unlike
that of Pepys; he aims to provide as well for himself as possible
without dipping too deeply into corruption or absolutely selling himself
to promote the designs of arbitrary power. He attaches himself to Danby,
whose leading maxim was to build upon the support of the country gentry;
successively follows him and Halifax with some misgivings; and, though a
devoted servant of James II., his enumeration of that monarch's
tyrannical acts is so honest, that, if every document of the age had
perished except his diary, enough might be deduced from this to justify
the Revolution. At this time he was Governor of York, where he was
surprised and imprisoned; and death overtook him shortly afterwards
hesitating between the old king and the new. His memoirs, imperfectly
published in 1734, were edited from the original MS. by Mr. Cartwright
in 1875.
Rich as the age was in the diaries of private men and memoirs of public
transactions, it did not produce many narratives of private lives in
strictly autobiographic form. The most important was that of William
Lilly the astrologer, whose character of Charles I. has been already
noticed. If, as most think, an astrologer must be either a fool or a
knave, there can be no doubt under which class to range this
entertaining author. Born (1601) at Diseworth in Leicestershire, 'a town
of great rudeness,' he was indebted for his grammar-school education to
his father's decayed estate, which made the farm not worth following,
and for his transfer to London to his total unfitness for all
agricultural work. He walked up to London by the side of the carrier's
waggon, got a place in London as general servant, where 'I saw and ate
good white bread, contrary to our diet in Leicestershire;' but, on the
other hand, 'sometimes helped to carry eighteen tubs of water from the
Thames in one morning.' Within a few years he made his fortune by
marrying his master's widow, and devoted himself for the rest of his
life to mathematical and astrological pursuits. He died, in good
circumstances, in 1681, and was honourably interred at the expense of
Elias Ashmole, to whom his autobiography is addressed. His numerous
astrological writings do not concern us here; his memoirs are no less
valuable than entertaining for the glimpses they afford into bygone
manners and contemporary feeling on public affairs, and particularly for
the lively portrayal of the singular characters with whom Lilly was
professionally brought into connection, prototypes of the spiritualistic
mediums of a later day, and not unfairly represented by William Hodges,
'whose angels were Raphael, Gabriel, and Uriel; his life answered not in
holiness and sanctity to what it should, having to deal with those holy
angels.' The following description of a Welsh conjuror is a
characteristic example of Lilly's graphic touch:
'It happened on one Sunday 1632, as myself and a Justice of
Peace's clerk were, before service, discoursing of many things,
he chanced to say, that such a person was a great scholar, nay,
so learned, that he could make an almanack, which to me then
was strange: One speech begot another, till, at last, he said,
he could bring me acquainted with one Evans in
Gun-Powder-Alley, who had formerly lived in Staffordshire, that
was an excellent wise man, and studied the black art. The same
week after we went to see Mr. Evans. When we come to his house,
he having been drunk the night before, was upon his bed, if it
be lawful to call that a bed whereon he then lay; he roused up
himself, and, after some compliments, he was content to
instruct me in astrology. I attended his best opportunities for
seven or eight weeks, in which time I could set a figure
perfectly: Books he had not any, except Haly de judiciis
Astrorum, and Origanus's Ephemerides; so that as often as I
entered his house, I thought I was in the Wilderness. Now
something of the man: He was by birth a Welshman, a Master of
Arts, and in sacred orders; he had formerly had a cure of souls
in Staffordshire, but now was come to try his fortunes at
London, being in a manner enforced to fly for some offences
very scandalous committed by him in these parts where he had
lately lived; for he gave judgment upon things lost, the only
shame of astrology: He was the most saturnine person my eyes
ever beheld, either before I practised or since; of a middle
stature, broad forehead, beetle-browed, thick shoulders,
flat-nosed, full lips, down-looked, black curling stiff hair,
splay-footed; to give him his right, he had the most piercing
judgment naturally upon a figure of theft, and many other
questions, that I ever met withal; yet for money he would
willingly give contrary judgments, was much addicted to
debauchery, and then very abusive and quarrelsome, seldom
without a black eye, or one mischief or other: This is the same
Evans who made so many antimonial cups, upon the sale whereof
he principally subsisted; he understood Latin very well, the
Greek tongue not at all: He had some arts above, and beyond
astrology, for he was well versed in the nature of spirits, and
had many times used the circular way of invocating, as in the
time of our familiarity he told me.'
Considering the fertility of the age in personal memoirs, its barrenness
in biography is remarkable. Apart from the lives by Mrs. Hutchinson and
Izaak Walton, to be noticed presently, and a few brief accounts of
celebrated men prefixed to their writings, almost the only example is
the cluster of valuable and entertaining family histories for which we
are indebted to Roger North (1653-1734), and one of these is an
autobiography. Roger North, brother of Francis, Lord Guilford, Chief
Justice of the Common Pleas and Jeffreys's predecessor in the Great
Seal, was a barrister, and a man of sound, though hardly shining parts,
who owed his extensive practice at the bar to the influence of his
relative. It fell off under the malevolent discouragement of Jeffreys,
and, at the Revolution, Roger, unable to take the oaths to the new
government, retired to his country estate in Norfolk, where he spent a
vigorous old age in gardening, building, vindicating the memory of his
brothers, writing his own biography, and 'cheerfully communicating to
all, without fee or reward, his great knowledge of the law'--virtuous
behaviour, but unprofessional. Two of the Norths were men of unusual
ability, the Lord Keeper and Sir Dudley, the eminent Turkey merchant,
who returned from a prosperous career at Constantinople to pack juries,
as his enemies alleged, in the storms of the Exclusion Bill agitation,
and to signalize himself as an authority on questions of trade and
finance. The Norths, a jovial race, full of sap and substance, were
staunch Cavaliers, and Roger's biographies of his brothers grew out of a
vindication of the Lord Keeper against the attacks of Bishop White
Kennett. His apologetic _Examen_, not published until after his death,
though important for the history of the time, can hardly rank as
literature. The biographies and autobiography, on the other hand, are
very good literature, though Dr. Jessopp is hardly warranted in styling
them English classics. They are neither planned with classic symmetry
nor executed with classic elegance; but are charming from their artless
loquacity and the atmosphere of fraternal affection in which they are
steeped, as well as most entertaining from their wealth of anecdote and
their portraits, partial, but not intentionally unfair, of remarkable
men. Two elements in these books are sharply contrasted, the political
and the anecdotic. The former affords a melancholy but useful
representation of the factious unreason of political parties in that
age, especially Roger's, and of the prejudices which kept Englishmen
apart until they learned toleration from Locke and Hoadly. It is to
Roger's credit that, although he had done his best to put it into James
II.'s power to overthrow the Church and trample on the laws, he recoiled
when the crisis came. A page or two after expressing his opinion that
good citizens never resist arbitrary power, he is found inconsistently,
though very rightly, lauding his brother Dudley for refusing, under the
strongest pressure from James, to mortgage his vote in Parliament; and
the whole tenor of his memoirs shows that, although his principles would
not allow him to acquiesce openly in the Revolution, he was at the
bottom of his heart by no means sorry for it. His antipathy to Jeffreys,
who had enacted towards his brother the part which Laud had formerly
performed towards Abbot, may have had something to do with this
attitude. His portraits of eminent lawyers, such as Hale, Saunders, and
Maynard, though sometimes disfigured by party feeling, have signal
value. The anecdotic part of the memoirs, on the other hand, is
delightful reading, being full of good-natured fun, shrewd observation,
and interesting glimpses of the manners of the times, sometimes well
worth noting, as, for example, this testimony to the popularity of the
Church of England in Wales in Charles II.'s time: 'I remember the
doctor' (Roger's brother John, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge)
'told us that when he came to his parish, he found the humour of the
people very different from what, on like occasions, was often found in
England. For, instead of grumbling at and affronting a new tithe-monger
came down amongst them, too often known in English villages, the
parishioners came about him and hugged him, calling him their pastor,
and telling him they were his sheep.' There are two especial
repositories of anecdotes in North's volumes, that of stories of
circuits and eminent lawyers in his memoir of the Lord Keeper and his
own autobiography, and the Turkish and Levantine sketches in the life of
his brother Dudley. The latter gives a most curious picture of the
relations of Mussulmans and Christians in the days when this was the
fashion in which unbelievers were noticed by sultans:
'The great officers about the Grand Signor, with whom he
[Dudley North] had transacted and familiarly conversed, told
his majesty that there was now in the city of Constantinople an
extraordinary _gower_ [Giaour], as well for person as abilities
to transact the greatest affairs. The Grand Signor declared
that he would see this extraordinary _gower_: and accordingly
the merchant was told of it; and at the time appointed an
officer conducted him into the seraglio, and carried him about
till he came to a little garden, and there two other men took
him by the two arms and led him to a place where he saw the
Grand Signor sitting against a large window open in a chamber
not very high from the ground; the men that were his
conductors, holding each an arm, put their hands upon his neck
and bowed him down till his forehead touched the ground; and
this was done more than once, and is the very same forced
obeisance of ambassadors at their audiences. After this he
stood bolt upright as long as the Grand Signor thought fit to
look at him; and then, upon a sign given, he was taken away and
set free again by himself to reflect on this his romantic
audience.'
This 'extraordinary _gower_' appears to have been the perfect ideal of
an orientalized John Bull. Having, as his brother assures us, 'an
uncommon disposition to truth,' it is surprising to find him actively
concerned in the subornation of perjury in Turkish law-courts, but this
Roger considers a demonstration of the strength of his mind:
'One must have a strong power of thought to abstract the
prejudices of our domestic education and plant ourselves in a
way of negotiating in heathen remote countries.'
[Sidenote: Mrs. Hutchinson's _Life of Col. Hutchinson_.]
Another biography of the time unknown to the age which produced it, but
a standard work and general favourite since its republication early in
the nineteenth century, is the life of Colonel Hutchinson, by his widow.
Lucy Hutchinson, third daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, Governor of the
Tower, was born in 1620, and in 1638 married Colonel John Hutchinson, of
a good Nottinghamshire family, who, after having taken an active part on
the parliamentary side during the Civil War, acted as one of the king's
judges, and retired into private life rather than accept employment
under Cromwell. He escaped prosecution at the Restoration, but
afterwards, upon suspicion of engaging in plots, was imprisoned in Deal
Castle, where he died from the unwholesomeness of his quarters. His
widow wrote his life between 1664 and 1670, but it was not published
until 1806. It is naturally an unqualified panegyric upon her husband,
redeemed from insipidity by the conjugal affection and devotion which
inspire it, and the elegant simplicity of the style. In panegyrizing her
husband, Mrs. Hutchinson unwittingly extols herself; she has no doubt
that he was among the wisest as well as the best men of his time, and
her simple conviction is so touching, that the reader is almost
persuaded to think so too. One of the most high-minded he certainly was,
but his independence verged upon impracticability. The strictly
historical value of the work is small, except as regards incidents of
the Civil War in Nottinghamshire. Mrs. Hutchinson was a highly
accomplished woman, and made a metrical translation of Lucretius, which
is extant in MS. in the British Museum. The time of her death is not
known.
[Sidenote: Religious Biography: Izaak Walton, 1593-1683.]
The most important ecclesiastical biography by a contemporary writer is
the life of Archbishop Williams, by Bishop Hacket (1592-1670), the
munificent restorer of Lichfield Cathedral, which, although first
published in 1693, was completed in 1657, and will be more fitly noticed
under the pre-Restoration period. This, though more intrinsically
valuable, is much less known than a series of little religious
biographies which owe their fame partly to the superior attractiveness
of the characters depicted, partly to their more manageable compass, and
partly to the charm of a tender and pious spirit, rather than of style.
Singularly enough, the author owes a still larger measure of fame to
another book composed in a similar spirit, but on a subject at first
sight (were it not for the profession of St. Peter) wide as the poles
asunder from ecclesiastical biography. Izaak Walton, biographer of
Donne, and author of _The Complete Angler_, was born at Stafford in
1593, and died at Winchester in 1683. He appears to have settled in
London as a draper about 1616, in a little shop over the Exchange,
'seven feet long and five feet wide.' In 1624 he was established in
Fleet Street, near the south-west corner of Chancery Lane. In 1643,
having secured a competency by trade, and probably finding that his
churchmanship and royalism exposed him to annoyance in London, he gave
up business and withdrew into the country, living, Wood says, 'mostly in
the families of the eminent clergymen of England,' unquiet habitations
in those times, one would imagine. He had, during his residence in
London, greatly ingratiated himself with the dignified clergy, and
distinguished himself as the biographer of one of the most eminent among
them, though this seems to have been a mere accident, Sir Henry Wotton
having requested him to collect materials for a life of Donne, which he
intended to have written himself. Wotton dying without having performed
his purpose, his mantle fell upon Walton, whose memoir, prefixed to an
edition of Donne's sermons, published in 1640, obtained so much success
that he was requested to write the life of Wotton himself. This was
completed in 1644, and appeared in 1651 along with the _Reliquiae
Wottonianae_, a collection edited by Walton. The lives of Hooker and
Herbert (the former a commission from Archbishop Sheldon) were written
shortly after the Restoration, under the roof of Morley, Bishop of
Winchester; the life of Bishop Sanderson was written as late as 1675.
Meanwhile the _Complete Angler, or Contemplative Man's Recreation_, the
book on which Walton's fame after all principally rests, had appeared in
1653, with copies of complimentary verse prefixed which seem to prove
that it was ready for the press in 1650. One of these effusions, by
Thomas Weaver, dated 1649, is a poem of unusual merit, much in the style
of Marvell. Walton, who had married a sister of Bishop Ken, died in the
house of his son-in-law, Prebendary Hawkins of Winchester, in 1683. His
will, which he had himself drawn up a short time previously, shows the
undiminished vigour of his faculties, and the endurance of his
connection with his native county. His character may be read in every
page of his writings, and is such as to prove that with him angling was
indeed the recreation of a contemplative man.
The maxim _noscitur a sociis_ is entirely in Walton's favour, for his
ecclesiastical heroes are the flower of the Church of England of his
day. His treatment is in general very satisfactory, entirely
sympathetic, the first qualification of biography, and much less marred
by prejudice and party spirit than was to have been expected from the
agitated character of the times. The simple unaffected style almost
verges upon garrulity. Though not a scholar, Walton seems to have
possessed sufficient acquaintance with theology to avoid
misrepresentation of eminent divines; while the chief value of his work
consists in its portrayal of almost ideal charity, meekness, and
learning; and in the curious anecdotes embedded in it, such as Pope
Clement VIII.'s high appreciation of Hooker, James I.'s influence upon
the composition of Sarpi's _History of the Council of Trent_, Charles
I.'s translation of Sanderson (unfortunately lost), and his infatuated
regret expressed to the same divine for having consented to the
abolition of episcopacy in Scotland. Walton, into whose composition
mirth entered, but not humour, records this with the same gravity with
which he chronicles Charles's injunction to the Merry Monarch to be
above all things diligent in the study of Richard Hooker. Some light may
possibly be thrown upon the vexed question of the interpolation of the
last three books of the _Ecclesiastical Polity_, by the statement of
Hoole, a contemporary schoolmaster, when exhorting his scholars to good
penmanship, that many of Hooker's sermons had been destroyed after his
death from the impossibility of deciphering his handwriting.